Shabana Mahmood has directly contradicted the Prime Minister’s claim that the Channel migrant crisis is due to Brexit.
The Home Secretary said she ‘doesn’t think it’s true’ that Britain’s departure from the European Union led to small boat crossings, or that it had made it harder to deport migrants.
Her comments were at odds with remarks made by Sir Keir Starmer last October when he said: ‘These are Farage boats, in many senses, that are coming across the Channel.’
Giving evidence to MPs, Ms Mahmood also admitted the ‘one in, one out’ deal with France has ‘obviously not dented the numbers yet’.
So far 367 migrants have been brought into the UK under the reciprocal terms of the treaty and only 305 have been removed, she revealed.
The Home Secretary also declined to give a commitment that Labour’s asylum reforms will start to see a fall in the number of small boat arrivals by next year.
In his remarks last October Sir Keir suggested Brexit made it more difficult to return migrants to France because Britain was no longer part of an EU agreement, known as the Dublin regulation, which technically allows asylum seekers to be sent back to European countries they previously travelled through.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, giving evidence to the Commons’ home affairs select committee on Wednesday, said she did not think it was ‘true’ that Brexit led to the small boats crisis
The PM said at the time: ‘I would gently point out to Nigel Farage [the Reform party leader] and others that before we left the EU, we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU and he told the country it would make no difference if we left. He was wrong about that.’
Ms Mahmood, giving evidence to the Commons’ home affairs select committee, said: ‘I would just dispute whether Dublin actually worked as was intended.
‘The EU have now themselves created a new pact because their own arrangements were not working as intended.
Sir Keir Starmer has previously said the Channel crisis was due to ‘Farage boats coming across the Channel’
‘So I would think it’s a bit of a stretch.
‘I’m sure there’s lots of other debates we had about the rights and wrongs of Brexit.
‘But is Brexit responsible for the boats? I don’t think that’s true.
Ms Mahmood added that the small boat journeys were ‘a new phenomenon’ and ‘the idea that this has happened because we’ve lost the access to Dublin and the returns agreement with the EU, I think that’s too much of a stretch’.
There were 41,472 small boat crossings in 2025 compared with 36,816 in 2024.
Migrants sprint across the beach at Gravelines, northern France, in August last year to board a dinghy to Britain
‘These are unacceptable and the numbers need to come down. What I would say is this is a fiendishly difficult problem to resolve,’ Ms Mahmood told the committee.
Asked whether she could confidently say numbers would go down by this time next year, she said: ‘I would love to be in that position. I can’t guarantee I’m going to be in that position.
‘That’s because the measures will take some time to come into effect.
‘We will legislate at the earliest opportunity to change the appeal system, to further restrict the way that Article 8 of the Human Rights Act is interpreted.
‘There is a whole range of legislative changes that we have announced, which we are working at pace to draft and get right before we pass them in a Bill – that all necessarily does take some time.’
A report by the committee, published in October, found the Home Office had ‘squandered’ billions of pounds on asylum accommodation contracts.
It also highlighted civil servants’ ‘chaotic’ and ‘incompetent’ approach to signing contracts with private companies to provide the housing.
Ms Mahmood told MPs today she was ‘open minded’ about exercising break clauses in those contracts – which are available to ministers as early as next month.
‘I’m very open minded on what we might do on things like the break clause … I’m not setting myself against the possibility,’ she said.